Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching

I know that Kory has already posted a blog about this article, however as I read the aforementioned article, I found myself growing very perturbed and annoyed with my fellow professionals and educators in the field of higher education. Thus, I decided despite a double post on this article, I needed to vent my frustration and author a blog about my sentiments and annoyance.

It seems that every Tuesday night we go to class and discuss, problem solve, and attempt to develop a means to generate faculty “buy-in” into the extremely valuable and quintessential assessment process, which would inherently assist us in our ability to “close the loop.” However, every class all we seem to do is come up with more road blocks or excuses as to why faculty should not or cannot buy into an assessment process. I understand that faculty are like all humans and are creatures of habit, but when it comes down to assessing the very thing that faculty are supposed to be facilitating – student learning – and they do not want to participate, it truly makes my blood boil. Students today are spending a lot of money or taking on a lot of debt to attend an institution of higher learning. Many of these students know that they will struggle to make ends meet while in college and even post-college, given the state of our current economy. However, these students put their trust in us as professionals, faculty, and an institution of higher learning, to take their tuition dollars and teach them all they need to know about their area of study, about life, and most importantly about themselves. We, as employees of an institution of higher learning, have been entrusted with student’s respect, money, and energy, and when faculty members or staff personnel at an institution fail to realize this and take their jobs lightly, quite frankly is makes me shake my head in disgust.

As a hall director, I relate to students in a way many faculty and staff never could, as I live with 300+ freshmen students. Every day, I have students in my office asking if college is right for them because their families need help paying bills, every day I have students complaining about how their professors don’t care even when students do go the extra mile, every day I see areas we, as in institution could improve our service to our students, yet nothing ever seems to change.

Thus, as I read the article written by David Glenn, entitled, “Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching,” I quite frankly was perturbed and decided to get on my soapbox. The article discussed how “…nearly 1900 presidents, provosts, and faculty members…” gathered at the annual Conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to discuss how to provide a better quality college education to students across the country. The focus naturally was on assessment and how colleges and universities need to embrace assessment in order to make any improvements to their programs and to the higher education field as a whole. The following old adage could have summed up the conference in a few simple words, “If you don’t know what’s wrong with your program, how do you know how to fix it?” More eloquently stated by Ronald Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, “Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds or educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students.” So, if assessment is what the field of higher education needs to prove its worth and make improvements for our students’ sake, why were countless breakout sessions about faculty buy-in?

I guess I simply do not understand as an idealistic higher education professional, why we need to convince faculty that assessment is important. If assessment really is what we are taught it to be – a means of measuring student learning – then why do we need to prove its worth to the very people who hopefully entered the field of education because they WANTED to teach and facilitate student learning?

The article went on to explain some potential means of enticing faculty to buy-in to the assessment process, which have been researched through the association’s “Bringing Theory to Practice project” examining assessment and faculty buy-in. Such incentives to encourage assessment participation mentioned and discussed at the conference, included: bonus pay, faculty teaching awards, tenure or promotion, as well as other faculty-reward structures. Ashley Finley, the association’s director of assessment for learning and presenter at the conference, “…read a comment from one respondent (in the association’s Bringing Theory to Practice project) who wrote that teaching awards ‘sound good at first… until people start to feel overlooked, or until it’s obvious that the awards are used to make the award givers look good.’” As I read this comment, I was enraged, and kept asking myself, why do people need to be rewarded to do their job? These faculty and professionals are already receiving a paycheck from an institution of LEARNING and should care about their students LEARNING and if they are not or will not participate in assessment methods that will help their students, who in turn are paying them their salaries through tuition dollars to TEACH them, then I’d say it’s time to tell these faculty and professionals “goodbye.”

We don’t reward the custodian for taking out the garbage; he/she simply knows it needs to be done as a function of their job. We don’t reward the cook for making a delightful dinner and getting rave reviews, it is expected of them to do such a task as it is a part of their job. So, why do we need to entice, reward, or inspire faculty to prove, through assessment, that their students are learning, when that is EXACTLY what they have been hired to do – it is a function of their job?

As an employee at a higher education institution, I am tired of excuses and trying to figure out what would motivate someone to do their job, isn’t pay and the satisfaction of providing a well-rounded, quality education to our students, our future, enough? When faculty, staff, and the institution as a whole embraces assessment and providing “high-impact” practices, the kind of practices that teach life lessons and inspire students to want to learn, that is when we have done our job and given students what they are asking and paying for while attending our institutions. I think Ken O’Donnell, associate dean for academic-program planning in the California State University System’s office of the chancellor, said it best in the article, “High-impact [educational] practices can change student’s lives. Their brains open up. After they become engaged in this way, the hell they’ll drop out.” Thus, the question remains for each and every one of us employed in an education position, “What are you doing today to improve student learning and how are you going to prove it?”

Glenn, D. (2010, January 24). Educators mull how to motivate professors to improve teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://chronicle.com/article/Educators-Mull-How-to-Motiv/63718/